Continuing Challenge: Education for ‘Sophisticated' Public Health Nurse Practice in Japan

Background: Public health nurses (PHNs) not only take care of clients in the community but also identify community problems through the processes of individual care and traditional community assessments. In Japan PHN activities get governmental support and PHN workforce is licensed by the government and well educated; new PHNs are now 85% from BS programs. But this makes a problem. The nature of BS education is such that the population of newly licensed PHNs as group is not so strong as previously, when more were RNs with a 1-year course in PHN in addition to 3-years for the RN. Master's education can provide in-depth experience with the quantitative and qualitative methods used to justify program innovation. Based on these ideas, a new master's course program for PHNs was created in 2006 at the University of Tokyo.

Purpose of the presentation: Through description of the program that addresses need for strong nursing and public health (PH) focus and practice that uses graduate level course work The program has been designed to compensate for differences in educational experiences relevant to public health nursing of nurses who earn their baccalaureate after becoming qualified as registered nurses in comparison to those who earn their baccalaureates in a four year program.

The course of study: As a two year master's course of the Graduate School of UT, 30 credits and a master's thesis are required. Lecture courses include public health nursing, family nursing, health sociology, epidemiology and bio-statistics, etc. Three practice courses are required: Continuous home visiting (Practice A) to visit the same clients more than 5 times and take care of the person and the family and find the change of their interaction; Community health nursing diagnoses and developing activity (Practice B) that builds on epidemiology and other PH tools including visiting more than 20 cases to provide insight into culture, needs, patterns of life; Public health nursing administration (Practice C) to focus on mobilizing resources to meet needs. Three students entered this program; their experience will illustrate its characteristics and the PHN practice we seek to develop.